Like everything else in life, gardens can be trendy, and when it comes to that, I’m as weak as the next person. Sedums are this year’s garden darlings, toppling over one another in container-pot arrangements everywhere I go. Some of these artful pots sell for $100 or more. I almost bought a particularly amazing potted […]

At first, the effect is incongruous—like seeing puppies for sale in a bookstore. Replacing a full row of booths inside Neo Burrito, an army of potted tomato plants now spreads its leaves under the spaceship glow of a hydroponics table. Going green: Neo Burrito’s Zak Yancey has turned part of his restaurant into an organic-gardening […]

I’ve always had a fascination with plants that have been manipulated by man. At one time in my life, I had a collection of at least 25 shallowly rooted plants, procured in the wild and at nurseries and chosen as the most grotesque and malformed specimens I could find for bonsai culture. Well-trained and fruitful: […]

Folks today dig in dirt because they like to. Sure, plenty of small growers raise flowers and vegetables, hawking their yields at seasonal markets. But most backyard gardeners do it for relaxation, love of nature, tradition or some hybrid thereof. Can you dig it? Jim McGee pauses a moment to praise a lowly earthworm before […]

My recent article on redoing my cottage garden (“The Aging Ageless Jardin,” March 25 Xpress), prompted lots of phone calls, e-mails and texts (sorry—I don’t answer those) all delivering the same message: Please don’t destroy your cottage garden! But, they went on, if you’re so heartless as to continue with your plan, well, what are […]

Oregano was the second thing I ever tried to grow on my own. Cacti came first, back when I was a teen and wanted a windowsill plant that wasn’t particular about water and other niceties. Initially, I tried my not-so-green thumb on a Christmas cactus. Because my grandmother could coax a puny, store-bought specimen into […]

Hollywood has degraded the fascinating Venus flytrap, turning it into a silly monster. Consider the bloodsucking Audrey II in the macabre 1986 musical Little Shop of Horrors. Or Cleopatra, the prey-strangling pet of Addams Family matriarch Morticia. Sticking around: This sundew lies in wait for its insect prey. Upon landing, the hapless bugs find themselves […]

I harvested my first asparagus recently. Their purple tips and green stalks rose out of the winter soil when all else in my garden was brown. They looked nothing like the shriveled, grocery-store spears that stand with their cut ends resting in icy water. Mine were almost a half-inch in diameter and growing so fast […]

In Mother Nature, harbingers abound, like news flashes of what’s to come. September’s Indian summer prepares us for October’s colors and sweatshirts. The katydids of August—called “school bugs” when I was a child—remind us that the laziness of summer is fading. Leaves whipping off trees in late November send us indoors for winter hibernation. One […]

On a cool but sunny day in late March, I parted a plastic curtain, stepped into a hoop house in Swannanoa, and found a flourishing garden. Arugula, Swiss chard, spring beauty, ‘Lollo Rosso’ lettuce, mizuna, bunching onions, carrots and more grew in long, wide rows of rich, dark earth piled almost a foot higher than […]

I turn 50 this year, and it’s time for a garden redo. Last year, my husband acknowledged his own milestone birthday by examining his somewhat balding head (I like it) and his very graying beard (I really like that). Then he made an appointment for a physical—in the 20 years we’ve been married, the first […]